GitHub CEO and Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath Keynoting Esri’s DevSummit!

We’d been looking for just the right keynote speaker to inspire the crowd at the Esri International DevSummit, and we’re pleased to announce that… *drum roll, please* Chris Wanstrath, the CEO and co-founder of GitHub, will be speaking to all you lovely developers this March.

Esri has been using GitHub for years, and and it’s the site so many developers choose to host and share their code, and collaborate with other developers and projects. GitHub is used by more than 5 million people and is home to more than 10 million repositories, or repos. What made GitHub a game changer and so popular is the easy collaboration – you can fork public code, change it up, and then submit a pull request back to its creator so they can easily merge the change in if they like. Esri uses GitHub to publicly share source for our ArcGIS solutions, and many other samples, projects, and products with the ArcGIS community. Esri also uses the Enterprise version of Github running on premises to share source between various development teams working on different parts of the ArcGIS platform.

Chris Wanstrath is a developer’s developer (which seems perfect for the DevSummit, which is “for developers by developers”). Chris decided to drop out of college – he was coding more than going to class, after all – and began his programming career at CNET. He later ran a successful Ruby on Rails consulting company with fellow GitHub co-founder PJ Hyett, and then in 2007 they began working on GitHub as a side project. Now it’s their main project – and a very successful one at that – and Chris is the CEO. Chris is an outspoken open source advocate who’s made hundreds of contributions to open source projects, and he’s spoken at events like NASA Open Source Summit, RailsConf, Open Source Bridge and OSCON.

We’re excited to have him at the DevSummit this March!

Jim McKinney, CTO of the ArcGIS development team, said, “We’re excited to have Chris join us and speak about his experiences while building GitHub, and how GitHub continues to evolve as a great social coding site in both the open source community and within the Enterprise. Esri uses GitHub to publicly share source for our ArcGIS Solutions, and many other samples, projects, and products with the ArcGIS community. Esri also uses the Enterprise version of GitHub running on premises to share source between various development teams working on different parts of the ArcGIS platform. I think this talk will be of great interest to many of our Developers, that may have never used GitHub yet for collaborative development work.”